Our July Sunday Corner With Lee Liberman -- DA 5 BLOODS: Apocalypse Here

This post is written by our

monthly correspondent, Lee Liberman

Spike Lee’s journey into the Vietnam miasma with black vets (Netflix) is a hot mess and a painful experience for this (white) viewer — it’s his scream of rage following millennia of white discrimination against non-whites because the white establishment could. I hated/loved/admired the 2.5 hour ungrammatical screed for making me suffer knowing what has been suffered. Watching Spike’s film is like the misery of our communal watch of George Floyd, boot-on-neck, for nine+ minutes. But Spike is also funny, witty, affectionate, honest and a lively storyteller — DA  5 BLOODS is a crazy ride, a comic-book page-turner, a lesson.

Spike, above left, with his stars in chief, Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr., ), Paul (Delroy Lindo), David (Jonathan Majors), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), goads you through their mission that starts full of joy at lively bar in Vietnam named Apocalypse Now. There, in modern Ho Chi Minh City, four (fictional) aging vets of the now old despised war have reunited to launch the recovery of the body of the fifth Blood (‘Blood’ is a term of brotherhood among black servicemen); below, they find their brother’s skull.

The departed is hero-turned-myth, ‘Stormin Norman,’ on whom the light shined, killed long ago in a firefight. He is played in flashbacks by Chadwick Boseman (below) a face known for his movie roles playing other myth-makers: Black Panther, Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall and James Brown.

The buddy group have also tasked themselves with finding a buried trunk of gold bars and figuring out how to divvy up the haul. Lee juxtaposes the Vietnam of the 60’s-70’s with race wars at home, setting apart the flashbacks using a square format and period camera equipment. It works seamlessly, as though you were busy in the present while seeing the past in your mind. He also puts today’s aging vets into flashbacks with heroic young Norman (second and third photos below) kaleidoscoping past and present.

Hanoi Hannah’s Famed North Vietnamese propagandist Hanoi Hannah (above l, who died at 87 in 2016, and Ngo Thanh Van, who plays her) comes through the portable radio on the battlefield to report Martin Luther King’s assassination and the uprisings in 122 cities that followed with near a third of the fighting men in Vietnam being black. She says: ‘Is it fair that you are fighting the white man’s war? Have a good day gentlemen…stay safe’. Da Bloods react to the news of King’s death with rage and grief....(below)

Otis quotes Norman’s influence on them to his godson, David, who has joined the quartet to repair emotional distance with his father Paul: ‘Norman taught us Black history when it wasn’t popular...schooled us about drinking that anti-commie kool-aid they was selling. Yeah, he was our Malcolm and our Martin…..’

Otis quotes Norman: ‘The man was using Bloods for cannon fodder. White boys who stayed in college, they’d dodged that shit. They put our poor black asses on the front lines, killing us off like flies…..War’s about money, money is about war. Everytime I walk out my front door I see cops patrolling my neighborhood like it’s some kind of war; I can feel just how much I ain’t worth…..’ You’d be wrong to expect ‘Da Bloods’ to actually feel like the polemic it is. Spike, a spiritual descendent of Berthold Brecht, jumbles politics, history, and theater into a film that acts like a play, here making a flamboyant ride with the jocular, noisy, squabbling, limping compatriots. Lindo’s Paul, the rogue in the MAGA cap, is the depressed, manicky central force speaking directly into the camera at the viewer, harnessing moments of desperate everyman (gaining him buzz for best actor nominations).

It is the busy plotting and sidebars (some being silly but contributing to the daily-life-ness of the messy whole) that allow Lee’s underlying political truths to seep into the brain with ease — fact relief from intense Paul and the noisy thrum. And there’s more, much more that Spike embeds in his today/yesterday Vietnam patchwork including assorted miscreants chasing after the about-to-be-found gold.

There’s double-crossing French businessman, Desroche, (Jean Reno) whom the Bloods hire to launder the golden horde. A group of French volunteers are wandering around in country to defuse landmines under the banner of ‘LAMB: love and mines/bombs’. LAMB’s founder is pale beauty Hedy (Mélanie Thierry), an heiress expiating guilt because her family's rubber plantations had exploited the Vietnamese during France’s colonial occupation of Indochina. Both Thierry and Reno are major stars of French cinema here in supporting roles, a nice touch for us and them.

Along the journey upriver to the Vietnam interior to find Da 5th and gold bars, local Vietnamese stray in and out of frame (‘you Americans killed my brother...my mother, my father’) — those who, like Da group, were also pawns of global power. Not least, Otis reunites with his former lover/sex worker and meets his/their grown daughter (below).

Spike has blended a good ol boys reunion, a noisy heist, a father-son (and other family) melodrama, drug addiction, and matters of morality and conscience into a film so packed with action (including good endings for the players who survive the junket) that it just about gets away with its long running time. Spike couldn’t have planned better than an accidental film debut alongside the largest mass movement at home since the 1960’s, driven by revulsion at the murder of George Floyd. Lee told Yahoo News …”People are fed up ...tired of the debasing, the killing of black bodies.” The throughline is the pain of black men fighting for rights overseas in a war they are losing at home. But today’s search for the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and yesterday’s (commie kool-aid) patriotism end up the same — guns blazing, brothers dead.

Some Notes: 

1. In the following story,from The Atlantic, the screenwriters discuss the evolution of the original script (Oliver Stone to have directed) into the film that matured into one featuring Black vets, directed and co-written by Spike Lee.

2. Spike Lee shares much with Berthold Brecht in temperament and political moxy. Credit to SJ Horton (who has acted in ‘Threepenny Opera’) for the apt Brecht reminder.

3. Watch this lovely rendering of Frederick Douglass’s speech of July 4 recited and commented upon by 5 of his young descendants -- and, in more current news, RIP, John Lewis, image below.

4. Experience the flavor of Da 5 Bloods in the movie trailer. 

DVDebut for Tom Herman's look at a hugely important part of U.S. journalism and history: DATELINE--SAIGON

For those of you around my age who came into adulthood (and then beyond) protesting the Vietnam War, here comes a terrific, not-so-new (2016) documentary -- DATELINE--SAIGON -- that will bring back memories of a time, a rotten and unnecessary war, and a group of journalists/photographers whose necessary and difficult work helped bring the truth of that war to the public eye and mind.

Much of what is covered by this fine documentary -- written and directed by Thomas D. Herman (shown at left) --  will be familiar to those who followed U.S. involvement in Vietnam from its inception on through our country's sleazy abandonment of the stupidly created and wretchedly run South Vietnam, once this war had been lost. (Anyone who tells you the outcome was some sort of "tie" is either lying or impaired.)

Full of fabulous tales and anecdotes (including some of the early mistakes made by these fledgling reporters) and featuring both archival footage of and more current interviews with the four leading journalists who covered the war -- Malcolm Browne, Peter Arnett, Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam plus that ace photographer Horst Faas -- the documentary is so packed with history and intelligent information that is seems particularly appropriate all over again, now, in our time of Donald Trump and his "alternative facts."

These five fellows (that's, left to right, Halberstam, Browne and Sheehan, above, and photographer Faas, below) offered so much more than the typical parroting-the-administration "take" on how the war was going that they pretty much led the USA from oblivious complacency into the kind of increasing activism that would eventually derail -- thanks in good part to television's finally broadcasting the war into the living rooms of America -- the lying Kennedy/Johnson administration and its "best and brightest" mechanics.

The movie is particularly accomplished in the way it handles the story of South Vietnam, the Diem regime, the infamous Madame Nhu (below, right) and the Buddhist uprising that simultaneously helped derail the South politically, even as the North continued to win the war.

For the younger generation that does not know as much about Vietnam as we older folk, I can't imagine a better history lesson than this film. Nor a better example of the kind of journalism we need now, more than perhaps we ever have before.

From First Run Features and lasting 96 minutes, Dateline--Saigon has its home video debut this coming Tuesday, July 14, via DVD and VOD. Click here for more information.

Michael Cimino's Oscar-winning THE DEER HUNTER gets Blu-ray/4K Ultra HD treatment

With the new release of both Blu-ray and 4K ultra high-def transfers of THE DEER HUNTER, yet another Best Picture "Oscar" winner joins the ranks of the embarrassingly over-rated. While certainly better than movies such as Crash, Around the World in 80 Days or The Greatest Show on Earth (to name but three of many), this film, directed by another Oscar winner Michael Cimino, with a screenplay (dialog as utterly prosaic as you could ask for) by Deric Washburn, who was Oscar-nominated, does have attributes still apparent enough for us to understand why it so impressed critics and movie-goers at the time of its 1978 release.

The war in Vietnam had ended but three years previous, and here was a movie that tackled that subject, seemingly in spades. The late director Cimino (shown at right) did a brave thing by tossing his audience into a day and night in the life of small-town Pennsylvania, using a Russian Orthodox wedding and its after-party as the way to introduce us to the film's large array of characters. Unfortunately almost all those characters prove to be unrelentingly dumb and drunk.

The exception is Michael, played by Robert De Niro, with a partial exception of another, Linda, played by Meryl Streep -- both of these, shown below, actors whose intelligence is difficult to keep under wraps.

Washburn's script underscores Michael's separation from the pack too obviously and heavily, with the uber-symbolic deer hunting sequence(s) set to embarrassingly awful music that tries to make the killing of a deer somehow a religious experience. Sorry: Even if the killing is done, as the movie would have it, via a single shot -- no dice. Instead it offers a look at Cimino's sentimentality in full swing.

The entire first hour of this three-hour-plus film is devoted to that pre-wedding, wedding and post-wedding party, and then the movie plops us into Vietnam, again with none of the usual basic-training or explanatory scenes we usually get in our war films. We're just suddenly thrust into post-battle, as the massacre of women and children, followed by a bit of vengeance, takes place. Soon our three heroes, Michael, along with his pals Nick (Christopher Walken, below)

and Steven (John Savage, below), are conveniently reunited, only to be, next moment, imprisoned and tortured by the North Vietnamese, in a scene featuring a form of Russian Roulette that was controversial at the time of theatrical release and remains so today. It works quite well, however, as a trigger for melodrama, the easy psychologising of Nick's character, revenge and a full-circle finale -- while providing a nifty action set-piece midway through the film.

Post-Vietnam-War we're back in Pennsylvania again, as our boys Michael and Steven pick up the very damaged pieces until, for the finale, Michael returns to Vietnam to "rescue" Nick. A lot of coincidence dots the movie, which, to my mind, prevents it from being taken nearly as seriously as a lot of critics did and do. As does the film's embrace of somewhat schlocky sentimentality posing as stark drama. (Plus, the scene at the wedding between our boys and that Green Beret at the bar seems cribbed from a class in Foreshadowing 101.)

The movie's view of the Vietnam War is utterly ahistorical in that it looks at the whole thing from the viewpoint of a small American town completely in thrall to both religion and patriotism. This is certainly true-to-life and it is also a valid viewpoint for a writer and director to take, should they choose it. Forty years on, this part of the film holds up, I would say, as well as it did upon original release. Even if you were dead set against this war, as I was , I think you must somewhat bow to the viewpoint here -- even if you might also wish that the filmmakers had included maybe one single atrocity by us Americans. But, hey, nobody so in thrall to religion and patriotism could ever see -- let alone admit to -- something like that.

What does not hold up, if it ever did, is the idea of The Deer Hunter as movie art. Even the performances struggle to rise above the obvious, with Ms Streep giving what may be the least interesting one of her entire career. Characters are mostly one- (very occasionally two-) note -- the men dumb and drunk, the women present to serve and/or be abused -- and the prosaic script gives them little chance to do much about this. Among supporting performances, the most interesting comes from George Dzundza, above, the least interesting from John Cazale, shown below, left.

Scene after scene endures past the point it should, adding to the huge length, so that by the film's finale, we can mostly sigh and shrug, Yeah, yeah: We get it. And then there's that final "deer" epiphany, accompanied by some more crappy, inspirational music. The Blu-ray transfer looks good but not great (TrustMovies does not have the equipment to view the 4K ultra HD disc), and among the bonus features, the interview with critic and film historian David Thompson is the most enjoyable. Even when I disagree with Thompson, I find this guy a delight.

From Shout! Factory/Shout Select, the two-disc boxed set of The Deer Hunter (Collector's Edition) will hit the street this coming Tuesday, May 26 -- for purchase (and, I would hope, rental). 

At FIAF's CinéSalon in September and October: BEYOND THE INGENUE as girls become women

What looks like yet another in FIAF's continuing stream of extremely interesting and well-curated (by Charlotte Garson and Delphine Selles-Alvarez) CinéSalon series of terrific Tuesday afternoon-and-evening movie sessions -- Beyond the Ingenue -- made its debut this past Tuesday with a film by and starring one of France's current cinema treasures, Noémie Lvovsky (most recently stealing the show in Summertime). Next Tuesday (September 20) will see the Pialat classic, À nos amours, then Céline Sciamma's Water Lilies on September 27, followed by that ever-watchable classic, Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach on October 4. You can view the entire series schedule by clicking here.

What has piqued TrustMovies' interest most, however, is the double bill of short films that has its U.S. Premiere on Tuesday, October 11 at 4 and 7:30pm: HARAMISTE (which I believe translates roughly as "forbidden to Muslims"), a shockingly delightful 40 minutes directed and co-written by Antoine Desrosières (shown at left), which will be shown in tandem with the 1994 made-for-French television film U.S. GO HOME, directed and co-written by Claire Denis. Both movies tackle the sexuality of adolescent girls on the verge of womanhood, but the twenty-year difference between the times in which these films were made speaks volumes, both about what is currently "permissible" -- even in France, forever the amour capital of the western world -- and how France (and everywhere else) has changed due to the results of immigration.

Further, the fact that Haramiste is inhabited by two young Muslim girls -- older and younger sisters -- makes what happens here just about jaw-dropping for those of us trained to think of Muslim females who cover their heads as somehow more "religious" and/or demure and sedate than their western counterparts.

And yet because these girls have lived in France for maybe their entire (or close to that) lives, aside from covering their heads, they seem, well, quite French. And quite teenage. And quite sexual. And quite verbal. The film's first scene takes place at a bus stop where the two are awaiting their mother, as they are accosted by a group of boys. They hold their own, while seeming both "interested" and properly staid and retiring. Yet, as soon as the boys leave and the girls open up to each other, all bets are off.

The bus stop scene, however, is nothing compare to what we get in the second scene, which takes place in the girls' bedroom. Yikes. This is so revelatory, and so funny, and so disarming, and so, well, scandalous, that I am somewhat surprised that a fatwa has not been taken out against the filmmaker and his cast. (Golly, maybe one has been.) In any case, Haramiste should turn topsy-turvy a lot of your pre-conceived notions and (hopefully) make you laugh your head off in the process.

Desrosières' cast -- Souad Archane (above, left) and Inas Chanti (above, right) --  could hardly be better (both girls contributed to the dialog and screenplay, as did Anne-Sophie Nanki), and the technical aspects of the film are just fine. But it's the very idea of the film, as well as its execution, that seals the deal.

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Ms Denis' movie, U.S. GO HOME (the filmmaker is shown above), though now twenty-two years old, is actually set back some fifty years -- during a time when the Vietnam War raged and the French (who had their own previous bad experience over there) were having none of it. Here, two young girls of the day (played by Alice Houri, below, left, and Jessica Tharaud, right) engage in their own sexual awakenings and experiences, helped (more like hindered) along by one of them's brother (a young and hugely charismatic Grégoire Colin, shown two photos below, who would go on, five years later, to star in Denis' Beau Travail).

Budding sexuality competes with political, social and economic concerns, all of this very nicely enmeshed by Denis. As is her wont, the filmmaker offers up behavior above all, and we watch, fascinated, as these two girls -- friends, but probably not for much longer -- pursue their own course with men, women, and each other.

Along the way, we encounter an American soldier (played by Vincent Gallo, below, right, with Ms Houri) who will appear again later, and quietly, rather sweetly (for Mr. Gallo) connect with Ms Houri's character. In one sense, not much happens here; in another, everything does. The night turns into morning and a new day in so many ways.

Made for French television in 1994, U.S. Go Home has, over the years, assumed a place in the canon (television-wise, at least) -- and rightfully so. Full of life and the fabulous music of the time, the 68-minute movie shows off these fine actors, at least three of whom would move on to other challenging and effective performances (Ms Tharaud appears to have stopped acting after Denis' Nenette and Boni, in which she, Houri and Colin also starred.)

I would call this double bill a must-see, and since it most likely will not be opening in theaters anytime soon, I suggest, for those of you in the tri-state area, heading for FIAF on Tuesday, October 11 -- and getting your tickets soon. Click here to see the entire Beyond the Ingenue series, and here to get tickets for the Denis/Desrosière double bill.

From the vault and worth seeing: Gessner & Hurwitz's LAST SUMMER WON'T HAPPEN

A remarkable testament to a time and a movement delivered in a manner which I have not seen anywhere else, LAST SUMMER WON'T HAPPEN, the hour-long, 1968 DIY documentary by Peter Gessner (shown below) and Tom Hurwitz shows us some of the leading players in the protest movement of that era -- from Abbie Hoffman to Paul Krassner to Phil Ochs and others -- in an almost offhand, fly-on-the-wall way that brings them to life quite differently from how we usually have seen and experienced them.

The war in Vietnam was raging at the time and so were the protests. The movie will make you wonder at how involved so many young people seemed to be back then, and how little so they seem to be now.  Inter-cut between what looks like black-and-white newsreel and TV footage, these color sections bring to life the place, the people and the situations in a way that places you smack in the center of things.

In addition, this odd and very homemade piece of filmmaking offers up interviews with denizens of Manhattan's East Village in that time period -- a runaway young girl (below), a drug-dealing young boy (further below) -- that capture the bruised spirit of the day in a style that is simultaneously spectacularly immediate and intimate, yet very off-the-cuff.

We so often saw (and still see), whenever this subject is addressed, people like Hoffman and Krassner "speechifying" and/or clowning around (particularly Abbie), rather than questing and questioning the way they do here. In this film they seem so much more like real people rather than performers, and the ideas that they and others offer up and then toss around and disagree with show the protest movement's very real conflicts that were not so easily settled.

The movie calls itself a "partisan look at these times," and indeed it is. But it not uncritical or simple-minded. It's a kind of time capsule that gives us everything from fashion and art to advertising and conversation of the day, and little of the music, too: Procol Harem and Country Joe and the Fish. (In one interview you'll notice a poster for the Broadway musical, Illya Darling, then playing at the old Mark Hellinger theater.)

There is no narration per se but plenty of people either speak (in public or in private) or are interviewed. It's interesting to see certain sacred cows of the left being mocked ("I have the feeling that Che Guevara used to kid around a lot, too," notes our favorite Yippie.) Listening to Hoffman (above and below) tell an assembled audience of mostly middle-aged and older folk how America's kids are going to keep coming to places like NYC East Village and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, looking for "a different America, a free America, and a revolution that's a threat to middle class American society," you can't help wonder what the guy, had he lived longer than his 53 years, would have thought of youth today. He's also funny and satirical about the Madison Avenue idea of revolution.

"This can't go on much longer," he notes, referring to society as it was then. Well, that was 45 years ago (when pollution and global warming were but whispers of what they have now become), and many of us are still saying the same thing, with no hope in sight.

The final discussions between, I believe, Paul Krassner and a couple of others, is something quite special. They talk of the thrill of beating up cops (who themselves had been doing plenty of beating up on protesters), of flying over America and realizing that the vast majority are not us, of this summer of protest set against last year's summer of love, and of whether Abbie will have burned himself out in two years -- all this is so fraught with bruised idealism, tamped-down hope and sadness that it is worth the entire movie.

Last Summer Won't Happen, from Icarus Films and running just 60 minutes, is available now on DVD, with some very good "extras": the excellent Time of the Locust, a 13-minute, award-winning, early documentary by Mr. Gessner that shows us the Vietnam War in a manner that had not yet been seen in America; and interviews with the two filmmakers from 2012 (which TrustMovies has yet to watch. He will as soon as a few more deadlines disappear). Finally -- be absolutely certain to scroll through the Photo Gallery in the EXTRAS section. This will let you know the identities of all those folk you've just seen, and in some cases what happened to them over the years. For more information on this little video treasure, click here.